Are We Really in the Back Row? - New English Review

by Joel D. Hirst (July 2019)

Man’s Head in Woman’s Hair, Edvard Munch, 1896

“We are better than they are, so why don’t they want to be like us?” tours—plastic wine glasses in hand as they careen through red America, gazing curiously through bullet-proof windows. There are lots of them—articles printed in elite coastal journals for the benefit of those who lack the courage to visit (remember “Who wants to go to small-town America now? You people scare us!”)—and they regularly miss the point.

On the streets, few can delude themselves into thinking they have it under control. You cannot ignore death there, and you cannot ignore human fallibility. It is easier to see that everyone is a sinner, everyone is fallible, and everyone is mortal. It is easier to see that there are things just too deep, too important, or too great for us to know.

weird election) that everything they thought, believed, understood about themselves and their world and their future and their philosophies was—in fact—only ashes and dust. One of the main problems with illiberal progressivism and its Marxist godfather is this issue of control based upon what economist Friedrich Hayek called the “local knowledge problem.”

as says 1 Corinthians 13:12. Or as Arnade puts it, “My biases were limiting a deeper understanding: that perhaps religion was right, or at least as right as anything could be. Getting there required a level of intellectual humility that I was not sure I had.”

Better than nothing, I suppose.

writes</a>; and in those echo chambers have convinced themselves that this somehow reflects their superiority. Even when it comes to self-reflective pieces such as Back Row America (the title of which itself drips hubris), they can’t seem to come to terms with the fact that perhaps they are actually the deficient ones—that their lives lived built upon stolen money and faulty ideas is perhaps not being lived as Jesus would have wished it “I have come to give you life, and life more abundant.” But only if we let him.

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